Author: Annie Edmundson
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Oblivious DNS: Plugging the Internet’s Biggest Privacy Hole
by Annie Edmundson, Paul Schmitt, Nick Feamster The recent news that Cloudflare is deploying their own DNS recursive resolver has once again raised hopes that users will enjoy improved privacy, since they can send DNS traffic encrypted to Cloudflare, rather than to their ISP. In this post, we explain why this approach only moves your private…
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How have In-Flight Web Page Modification Practices Changed over the Past Ten Years?
When we browse the web, there are many parties and organizations that can see which websites we visit, because they sit on the path between web clients (our computers and mobile devices), and the web servers hosting the sites we request. Most obviously, Internet Service Providers (ISPs) are responsible for transmitting our web traffic, but…
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Routing Detours: Can We Avoid Nation-State Surveillance?
Since 2013, Brazil has taken significant steps to build out their networking infrastructure to thwart nation-state mass surveillance. For example, the country is deploying a 3,500-mile fiber cable from Fortaleza, Brazil to Portugal; they’ve switched their government email system from Microsoft Outlook to a state-built system called Expresso; and they now have the largest IXP…
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Security Audit of Safeplug "Tor in a Box"
Last month at the FOCI workshop, we presented a security analysis of the Safeplug, a $49 box which promised users “complete security and anonymity” online by sending all of their web traffic through the Tor onion routing network. Safeplug claims to offer greater usability, particularly for non-technical customers, than the state-of-the-art in anonymous Internet browsing:…